Table of contents for SXSW Themes

1. Interconnectedness and Cooperation Overlaid Onto Real Life – SXSW Themes
2. Do you make happiness, dreams, or just kick ass? – SXSW Themes
3. There is more to gain by giving it all away – SXSW Themes
4. Embrace randomness – SXSW Themes

THEME 4: Embrace randomness
‘Go with the flow’ was definitely the best piece of advice I got for sxsw. It’s good to plan, but feel free to break that plan for a chance to go somewhere random with a random group of people. I’ve been very interested in the balance of structured efficiency versus embracing randomness and the effect that has on both creativity and your ability to be effective.

I was moving towards structured efficiency until I read an amazing book on creativity in the workplace called “Orbiting The Giant Hairball” which takes a very opposite approach. Like many things, I think the answer is in the middle, and I think Tim Ferriss nails it on his head in 4 Hour Workweek by showing how carefully placed structure can free you up so that you have much more time to live more randomly (if that’s what you want). Structure if used right can be complementary to randomness

Table of contents for SXSW Themes

1. Interconnectedness and Cooperation Overlaid Onto Real Life – SXSW Themes
2. Do you make happiness, dreams, or just kick ass? – SXSW Themes
3. There is more to gain by giving it all away – SXSW Themes
4. Embrace randomness – SXSW Themes

THEME 3: There is more to gain by giving it all away

Not exactly a theme of this year’s sxsw in particular, but of the whole blogger rooted culture that has grown sxsw to where it is now. The whole experience was almost like living inside Web 2.0. It’s a weird analogy, but the best way I can think to explain it. The culture of the people there is one where everyone has adopted the idea of broadcasting thoughts to the world. It’s a glimpse of where the internet is moving our whole society towards, where information is no longer locked up and protected, but rather everyone comes to the realization that there’s actually more to gain by giving it all away.

That realization has provided motivation for me to get back into blogging and feeling free to broadcast my thoughts to anyone who wants to listen. What good is an idea in a walled garden if no one ever sees the garden? And for me, it’s more than spreading ideas. Honestly, not that many people will be reading my ideas here on randomdestiny.com. But I gain more by the act of fully developing an idea and communicating it to the world. There’s more to gain in that act than having the biggest lockbox of ideas in the world.

Table of contents for SXSW Themes

1. Interconnectedness and Cooperation Overlaid Onto Real Life – SXSW Themes
2. Do you make happiness, dreams, or just kick ass? – SXSW Themes
3. There is more to gain by giving it all away – SXSW Themes
4. Embrace randomness – SXSW Themes

THEME 2: Help people kick ass so they can reach their dreams. That’s how you create happiness. Make that your business and your life.

Happiness
The products and services we build have a wide array of goals. We think of our business as being the category that our product falls into. My company, Revolution Health, is obviously in the business of health content, tools, and community, right? Well, most businesses are reducible to the business of happiness. Jane McGonigal predicted that quality of life will become the ultimate measure of a product. “Happiness is the new capital.”

Kicking Ass
Similarly, Kathy Sierra asked “How do you help your users kick ass?” I found that to be a really powerful question. How much time do we spend at work on work that does not help an end user kick ass? If that’s the majority of the time, either the product is on the wrong track or you’re doing the wrong work.

New Measurements
We need to reframe and re-evaluate what we and our products actually accomplish in our end users. Metrics should not be around page views and sales but around how effective we’ve allowed someone to be or how many interruptions we’ve eliminated from someone’s life.
Jane provided four common elements that provide true happiness across the board. Take these as starting points for your new ‘happiness startup’.

1) Satisfying work to do
2) The experience of being good at something
3) Spending time with people you like
4) Chance to be part of something bigger

Dreams
I want to leave you with Randy Pauch’s life changing talk on making people’s dreams come true. Creating happiness is something bigger than the products and services we work on. It’s how we should live our lives.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Update: Looks like Randy Pauch has written a book based on his amazing lecture.

Table of contents for SXSW Themes

1. Interconnectedness and Cooperation Overlaid Onto Real Life – SXSW Themes
2. Do you make happiness, dreams, or just kick ass? – SXSW Themes
3. There is more to gain by giving it all away – SXSW Themes
4. Embrace randomness – SXSW Themes

After transcribing my 15 pages of handwritten notes and starting to think through some of it, I’ll be posting a few big takeaways and themes I pulled from South By Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) this year. Here’s the first:

THEME 1: Interconnectedness and Cooperation Overlaid Onto Real Life
A feeling that I came away with after sxsw was that I had just experienced the super-connected world we envision the future to be. Everyone had macs and iphones, icons of great user centered design, and was completely interconnected in a wireless digital sea. But this high tech interconnectedness did not draw people away from face to face interaction (which we often blame new technology for doing). Instead, it actually enhanced it and sped it up. Twitter allowed people to move in groups and figure out what others were doing, yelp helped people sort out what places to go to, social networks like facebook instantly made long term connections for followup and learning more about the person you just met.
On a more global scale, web 2.0 tools are helping with the spreading of ideas and knowledge and helping people take cooperative action with that knowledge.

Spreading ideas
The Africa 2.0 session showed how Africa’s rising entertainment center, known as Nollywood, is currently relying on the internet to get content out and get Africa’s message out to the world (rather than Hollywood’s interpretation of it). Zuckerberg talked about how students from the Middle East that go to western universities are staying in better contact with friends from home and creating idea bridges between the two worlds.

Cooperation
On top of the spreading of ideas was the idea of cooperative action on those ideas. People have worked together to create an index of knowledge known as Wikipedia that is far larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica. Henry Jenkins spoke about how Harry Potter social networks in the UK are starting to make political actions as the members grow together. Facebook groups allow people to channel joint interests or movements together

Overlaying real life
In the last few years I think the new web 2.0 technology and jargon have been the focus. But it seems like the discussion is starting to revolve a lot more on how those technologies are creating real world changes and disruptions. A last example of this was Jane McGonigal’s talk on how games can be used to better design real life. Mashups on the internet between two technologies has become a daily occurance, but this talk sheds light on the new ultimate mashup, the mashing up of technology and the world. Online gaming and social networks have drawn users from the real world to the virtual world, but new ways and ideas are emerging to push some of that back into real life.

Live example:

http://www.bluehost.com/tell_me_more.html

Click on ‘Demo Login’ button

I’ve thinking this could be a useful model for navigating a personal health record. Imagine if the icons on this example dashboard were instead PHR fields or doctors you have saved to your PHR. This would definitely help in retrieving information out of PHR quickly or make updating a single value easier.

A lot of the hosting sites were relatively close in stats like storage, bandwidth.  All of them were way over what I’d ever imagining ever using (though if my blog got that much traffic it’d be nice).  In the end, the ability to jump into a chat at any time to fix problems really trumped the little differences in hosting statistics.  I ended up firing up 3 chats to solve some minor issues I had while setting up my site.  Had this been with a hosting company that only had phone or e-mail I would’ve gone nuts, but instantly solving problems with really helpful reps was a pleasure.  Blue Host wins with the great user experience.

Also nice is the automatic WordPress install and easy to use panel that they let you sample before the site.  Pricing is reasonable.  They do make you sign up for at least 3 months, and at least 12 months to avoid the $30 setup fee.  However, they have a 30 day cancellation guarantee so to me it’s fine to have the longer contracts.  I went for the 12 month.

One piece of UI I really liked was their Recently Viewed / Comparison box. On many sites I’ve seen the Comparison feature placed in the search results and Recently Viewed as a separate piece of functionality (like on the bottom of Amazon pages). This is a really smart combination of showing your last 4 viewed products, linking to those products (clicking on the picture), ability to compare a subset (checkmarks and compare button). The final touch that really make this UI superb is the ability to remove items from the widget. Often the usefulness of modules like this are diluted because they get filled up with items that you aren’t interested in at all. The list gets so full and loses relevance and it’s almost as easy to go back to the search results to move back and forth between products.

So what did I end up buying? I went with the Canon Powershot S870. Canon still seems to be the leader in this class of cameras (ultracompact and compact). High ratings, fast load up time, image stabilization, and small size were the main reasons. I also ordered the new wireless SD card called Eye-Fi. This card transfers your photos directly to your computer and/or online photo sharing site wirelessly. I’ll write about how it works after trying it out.

If you’re looking for a camera for your mom or anyone a little older, I recommend the Panasonic Lumix TZ3. The camera’s exterior has a bit more of a big and chunky feel. The controls are more tangible feeling than many of the ultracompacts. I think my mom was really drawn to it because it reminisced of her analogue film camera. The screen is pretty big and Panasonic used nice big clear fonts and my mom immediately made positive comments on as soon as they came up. The 10x zoom lens is pretty beautiful for a consumer grade camera, probably at the upper end of its class. Definitely a great choice for anyone who doesn’t need one of the ultra small cameras that are becoming the norm for consumer models.

I’m back from SXSW Interactive today and am feeling quite delusional from the lack of sleep and 5 days of hearing great ideas and meeting amazing people. I think the best part of the conference was just being around such interesting and passionate people in similar fields. As a fairly new user experience designer, it was great to finally meet other similar people around the country and hear their stories.

I’ve got tons of notes to sift through this week but will get to that tomorrow, as well as get started on making arrangements for next year. =) For now, here’s a few of my favorite quotes from this week:

“Ebola style virality” (from battledecks)
“Fuck yea, it scales!” (also from battledecks, probably the best slide I’ve ever seen, see below)
“Steve Jobs is like the pope of design”
and
“The liver is evil, it must be punished” (indeed)

Schedule your panels AND parties
Sched.org is probably the most helpful resource you’ll find for planning your SXSW. It comes set up with every panel and party for the whole week. You mouse over to read the description and select the checkmark if you want to put it on your calendar. At the end you can access your list at a custom URL or download it all to an ical folder. This is a really awesome site.

Where to eat
A great thread listing places to eat over at Chowhound. One place that keeps popping up is Casino El Camino. I’ll definitely have to stop by for a burger.

Get a map
A great easy to read map of downtown Austin can be found at downtownaustin.org (pdf download). Great for locating things, though I hear 6th street is kind of the epicenter of everything, so you might not really need a map as long as you can get there.

Listen to music
Get into the frenzy by listening to free SXSW music through the SXSW Player. The bands you hear on there will probably be walking around while you’re there.

Other Austin stuff
Time to explore the city will probably be a little scarce with all the stuff going on downtown, but a here’s a pretty good travel guide for Austin.

And of course, don’t forget to set up a Twitter account and hook it up to your phone.

When you’re dreaming with a broken heart
The waking up is the hardest part
You roll outta bed and down on your knees
And for the moment you can hardly breathe
Wondering was she really here?
Is she standing in my room?
No she’s not, ’cause she’s gone, gone, gone, gone, gone….

When you’re dreaming with a broken heart
The giving up is the hardest part
She takes you in with her crying eyes
Then all at once you have to say goodbye
Wondering could you stay my love?
Will you wake up by my side?
No she can’t, ’cause she’s gone, gone, gone, gone, gone….

Oooooooooohhhhhhhhh

Now do i have to fall asleep with roses in my hand
Do i have to fall asleep with roses in my hand?
Do i have to fall asleep with roses in my hand?
Do i have to fall asleep with roses in my hand?
Would you get them if i did?
No you won’t, ’cause you’re gone, gone, gone, gone, gone….

When you’re dreaming with a broken heart
The waking up is the hardest part

-John Meyer

Well, I had no good answer so I thought a good thought experiment would be to imagine yourself physically staying on your bed for weeks, not touching the phone, any of your books, talking to roommates, looking out the window, or anything. You’re just completely cut off from the world around you and you don’t get a chance to tell anyone in advance. What strikes you the most? Who gets the most worried about your well being? Who is let down? What things you are involved with crumble down? And for all the things for which you identify someone or something, which things Really make you long to be back?

Well, a number of things came to mind, but here are my first few immediate, most visceral thoughts. The first thing that came to mind was how worried my parents would be. I know I would be getting a long string of concerned calls and e-mails from them. The feeling of abandonment they’d feel if they knew I was ignoring them really struck me hard because I know how much it means for them just to receive a simple phone call or card from any of their kids. Not being able to hear or see my girlfriend would also be one of the worst things. I’ve really cherished every bit of our three years together even through the long distance which has been tough. I think I’d also spend a lot of time on that bed thinking about where I hadn’t done the best job as a boyfriend and wished I had opened up more.

The first two things that hit me so far had been relationships. The other two were about missed opportunities. One is the missed opportunities to change the world. Now, I don’t mean to be so pretentious as to say I’m sparking global movements. I mean it as making some kind of positive impact on the world around me, through the designs I do at work, helping friends one-to-one, writing a blog post that changes the way someone thinks, or simply figuring out how I will make that positive impact sometime in the future. Finally, I’d miss the opportunities to learn. One of my biggest joys is simply learning new things about this world and processing what I learn into new ideas.

So that’s what came to mind for me. On a lighter note, if you’re Really having trouble getting out of bed in the morning, try this alarm clock (revealed by a I’m Feeling Lucky Google search for “what wakes you up in the morning”):

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/004283.php

I’d like to thank the professors at the University of Pittsburgh Center for Dental Informatics, Titus Schleyer and Thankam Thyvalikakath, and the head of the Carnegie Mellon HCI undergraduate project course, Jason Hong, for making this all possible.

See the research write-ups and video demo for the paper.

So in a way Microsoft has offloaded much of the user experience of storing health information to third parties. While this probably helped them get a jump on Google and other players in getting the product out, I think it leads to a very disjointed experience. I need to go to the AHA to enter my blood pressure and to another program with another set of visualization tools to look at another type of health measurement. A good move would be to create a Facebook style hosting platform where these third parties could host the front ends of their applications within a section of the HealthVault, or at least have a place where viewing and data entry are accessible.

The thing that I like most is the downloadable Connection Center application. It syncs the data from a variety of hardware monitors and uploads them to your Health Vault account. In the end, it’s this kind of usefulness and ease of use that is needed for people to make the leap to use a system like this. Privacy is always a concern, but time and time again we see the initial privacy scare fade away with every new technology. Remember when online banking seemed like a gamble? There’s a threshold at which the usefulness of the new paradigm mitigated our privacy fears.

But here’s where Microsoft’s partner strategy takes a twist. By having you give access to a third party to enter data, your information is always going through another party besides Microsoft. This seems a bit strange, akin to Citibank making me funnel all my transactions through Paypal. Because of that Health Vault really should have at least some basic information entry and editing so that it can work in a complete silo.

It started off with a viewing of Sicko, Michael Moore’s new film, which I’ve started to write about but will go into more deeply as I think more about the core issues and where I feel I can make an impact on the end goal of improving health care in this country.

2) iPhone

It turns out a workmate skipped the movie to wait in line for the much anticipated iPhone. I briefly got to play with the phone. The pure pleasure of navigating through the interface definitely lives up to the hype. I found multiple times I would start asking “how do I…”, but I could always figure it out before finishing the sentence. Darn Apple for being so intuitive! The screen is beautiful and the finger interactions are great. The typing was a bit tough, not sure if I just needed more time with it. I’m still going to wait for the next generation before getting one.

3) All You Can Eat Crabs

Next was All You Can Eat Crabs at Tim’s Rivershore Restaurant and Crabhouse. For three hours we were tearing apart the bodies of crabs, scavenging for the delectible crab meat, and mending our crab shell injuries in butter. I think the picture of the remains speaks for itself. Tim’s is a really awesome crabhouse right by the Potomic river where you can dig your feet in the sand while you feast on crabs and other good stuff. Highly recommended.

4) Live Free or Die Hard

Live Free or Die Hard was freakin ridiculous and hilarious. A fun summer action flick.

5) Smithsonian Folklife Festival

Finally, the Folklife Festival was a lot of fun. It’s a huge festival on the national mall that explores a few parts of the world each year. This year it was Virginia, the Mekong River, and Ireland. Great food across the board and really good performances. The most interesting presentation was this one on tea. I had no concept of how in depth the world of tea was. I learned how certain types of tea are actually aged for long times like wine to develop their taste. These teas are actually aged longer and are sometimes more costly than expensive wines. He went through all the subtleties of serving tea to bring out all the nuances of these high grade teas. Things like pouring boiling water over all the cups and pots before to get them hot to keep the tea hotter, using clay pots to build flavor over time, slurping to aerate the tea and get more flavor out, etc.

Many accuse any public personality that uses irony, sarcasm, or humour to make their point as being unethical. I believe these persuasive techniques are completely valid and almost necessary in today’s world. The average consumer of information recieves more quantities of information than they can ever process or research the validity of. Much of this information comes from profit seeking organizations that are not completely aligned with our interests. You better believe that every company profiled in Michael Moore’s film has a very large team of professionals who’s job is to persuade the public in the exact opposite direction of what Michael Moore is preaching. The only difference is this type of persuasion gets nice shiny names like “public relations”, “marketing”, and “educating the public”.

In a way, irony, sarcasm, and humor are some of the most powerful persuasive tools of our day for individuals who do not have extensive resources. I’ve seen stand up comedians make some of the strongest statements about our society, going into subject areas that would be unacceptable in any other situation.

Recently, it’s really come to my attention in multiple ways that I shield my emotional side, quite obviously, from others. For whatever reason in my life I’ve managed to try to tuck this area away and always resort to completely thinking through everything. But I’m realizing the negative impacts this has been having on myself and others. First of all, trying to hide emotions is always a pure path to disaster. I know everyone can see right through me, or at least tell I’m hiding something. I also just waste away overthinking and overanalyzing everything. Instead of just having a conversation, I actively think about what everything I say will make people think, and then wonder how they’ll respond, etc. I’ll get completely hung up on the smallest things.

I do feel like the things in the book and these thoughts on my own emotions are related. I need to stop getting hung up on perfectly crafting everything I throw out into the public space. I’ve been under the false impression that coming across as who I want to be is a matter of just thinking through everything I say with enough thoughtfulness and forethought. But that just leads me down the path of over-analysis, insincerity, and getting stressed the hell out about everything. The insight I got from Blink was that maybe the answer lies in the most natural, unconcious part of me. Simply letting snap emotional judgments be satisfactory and trusting their instincts.

I started to do that a bit today, just opening up and being Transparent. I haven’t felt that free in a while.

Table of contents for Quicksilver configuration

1. Setting Up Quicksilver’s 10 Most Useful Features Part 1
2. Setting Up Quicksilver’s 10 Most Useful Features Part 2

Here is part two of the tweaks and configurations you’ll need to make to Quicksilver to make it a productivity powerhouse. The focus here is on the bare bones steps to get you up and running so you can see what all the Quicksilver hype is about because the program doesn’t come with a lot of the features preconfigured to work off the bat. Click here to see part 1.

6) Calculator
- In Plugins: Install the Calculator Module
- Open Quicksilver and enter: “.” + “=” + <the equation>
- The period enables free text mode (ie it won’t try to find files
and applications while you type) and the equals sign puts in in
calculator mode.

7) Dictionary
- In Plugins: Install the Dictionary module
- Open Quicksilver and enter: “.” + <the word>
- Tab over and start typing “dictionary”

8. Address Book Contacts and sending E-mails
- In Plugins: Install the Apple Address Book module as well as the
Apple Mail, Entourage, or Gmail module depending what you use
- Open Quicksilver and type the name of the recipient
- Tab over and start typing either “Email” or “Compose”

9) iCal
- In Plugins: Install the iCal module
- Open Quicksilver and enter: “.”
- Enter the name of the event and time information. iCal is pretty
smart and can decipher the key date and time info as long as you
keep to standard date formats

10) Proxies- Access to all menu items from the current application
- Insanely powerful feature. Most of the time you don’t know
keyboard shortcuts but you know pretty much what the name of the
menu item is that you want. Now you can just start typing that
in Quicksilver to call up any action in the program you’re in.
- In Quicksilver preferences
- In Preferences: Enable Advanced Options
- In Plugins: Install “User Interface Access+” module
- In Catalog>Quicksilver: Check Proxy Objects
- In your Mac System Preferences > Universal Access: Check “Enable
access for assistive devices”
- Open Quicksilver and type “Current Application” + Tab + “Menu bar
items”. If the corresponding commands show up, you are set up.
Hit tab again and type a command to issue your first proxy
command.
- The final step eliminates the need to have to type the last two
commands every time by creating a trigger.
In Triggers > Custom: Create a new trigger for this sequence (it
should have the last action prepopulated when you create a new
one) and create a hotkey for the trigger (I use option+space).

* Bonus tip: Bookmark Training
- First, I recommend bookmarking all the sites you go to most
often. If you’re like me, you probably never bothered to
bookmark google.com, and other sites that you go to so often you
don’t even bother to bookmark. Having these in the system makes
it much more powerful.
- Go through the sites you visit the most and try calling them up
by starting to type their names in Quicksilver. A lot of them
probably won’t be the first result. You need to train them to be
the first result by selecting them one or two times.
- After doing this, you’ll be able to pull up any page instantly.
You’ll never want to even click to open your browser.
- *Note: You’ll want to rescan your catalog whenever you add a new
bookmark by hitting cmd+R to make sure it shows up.

* Super bonus tip: File/Text grabbing
- Now you can select a file or text and literally grab it right
into Quicksilver. Uses include picking a file and sending to
someone, selecting a URL and opening it, selecting a phrase and
sending it to a Google Search.
- In Preferences > Extras: Check “Pull selection from front
application instead of Finder
- Select some text or a file
- Open Quicksilver and hit cmd+G and the selection should show up
in Quicksilver
- *Note- it seems like it won’t grab text from some non-cocoa apps
like Firefox

Table of contents for Quicksilver configuration

1. Setting Up Quicksilver’s 10 Most Useful Features Part 1
2. Setting Up Quicksilver’s 10 Most Useful Features Part 2

If you don’t know what Quicksilver is, go to the Quicksilver homepage to download and see this excellent introduction at Lifehacker.

So you’ve started dabbling around with Quicksilver, launching applications and opening files. You know it’s supposed to be able to do so much more, but you’re not sure how to get to all that cool stuff. Unfortunately, a lot of that cool stuff is dead simple to use, it’s just that Quicksilver doesn’t come with a lot of the cool stuff configured. It’s not helped by the fact that there’s a lot of posts with great usage tips and tricks but they usually fail to explain all the setup and correct preferences to get the features actually working.

So here I will outline the 10 applications of Quicksilver than I think are the most useful. These 10 probably account for 90% of what I do with Quicksilver. The focus will be on actual set up instructions rather than details about what the feature does or how to use the feature.

The first two items are super basic, just including them to be comprehensive:

1) Application Launcher- the most basic Quicksilver task
- Type the name of any application and hit enter

2) File finder- another super basic task
- Unless you keep all your files in the standard Mac folders,
you’ll probably want to go to Catalog > Custom and hit the +
button and add other folders to make sure they show up in the
search results.
- For newly added files, you’ll need to rescan your catalog by hitting
cmd+R before you search. This is because Quicksilver caches the
index of your drive. That makes it faster than Spotlight, but
sometimes misses files you just added.
- I recommend Quicksilver over Spotlight for file searching. It’s
faster, it learns what you pick as your first choice on files you
grab a lot, and you can perform a multitude of actions on the file
(rather than just open).

Now here’s the juicy stuff:

3) Google Search (and many other search products)
- In Plugins: Install the Web Search Module
- In Catalog > Modules: Check Web Searches
- Open Quicksilver and type “Google Search” and tab over to enter
your search query

4) Bookmarks
- For Firefox
- In Plugins: Install Firefox Module
- In Catalog: Make sure Firefox is checked
- For del.icio.us
- In Plugins: Install the Social Bookmarks module
- In Catalog: Add a new Social Bookmarks item from the “+” menu
in the bottom
- Hit the info button after adding the item and enter your
login info

5) iTunes control
- In Plugins: Install the iTunes module
- In Triggers > iTunes: Check Next, Previous, Pause/Play, and
Search iTunes
- Then click on the button icon for each and add a hotkey. I use:
- opt + cmd + left/right for Next/Previous
- opt + cmd + down for Pause/Play
- opt + cmd + up for Search

There’s been quite a design overhaul from our preview site that launched in January. Most of the effort went into cleaning up the navigation and visual design. Check it out and let me know what you think!

CHI was held in San Jose, CA, the heart of Silicon Valley. Yes, I got to visit the Googleplex (got a 1-on-1 tour from the best tour guide ever), got to eat lunch there, and sit on their heated toilets (I didn’t have the nerve to turn on the auto wash/dry feature). Their party was off the hook! I also got to visit Yahoo, Nokia, IBM, and Stanford through complimentary tours the day after the trip.

I went about this conference much differently from last year’s CHI. Last year I pretty much stayed with a few people I knew well and quietly went from session to session. I got a decent amount of value, but somewhere in the year between I realized the really important learning and value from a conference goes on in the hallways and lunch tables that fill the gaps between talks. I had the honor of meeting some really great people and forging new relationships.

I discovered SIG’s at this conference, Special Interest Groups. These are sessions where you sit in smaller circles and discuss a topic with people really passionate on the subject. There’s no better place to meet people with similar interests and get fully engaged in a topic rather than passively watching a speaker.

CHI2008 is taking place in Florence next year. That should be really exciting. However, I’m also considering trying a new conference that has more of a design and industry focus since that is more applicable to what I do. CHI is very heavy on methods and research. I’ve heard good things about SXSW. I’m also interested in checking out BJ Fogg’s Persuasive Technology conference as well as Usability Week. So many choices…

NBC news in New York, I believe, was talking about online health sites they like. The two sites reviewed were the Toolkit landing page and the calculators. The medical guy actually ran through the Lose One Pound calculator. They talk start talking about Revolution Health about 2 minutes in. I’m quite flattered. Thanks Sree at NBC!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Link to video

Keep an eye on RevolutionHealth.com this week as we’re going into our version 1.0 launch!

The big hit was Latino Dim Sum Brunch at Cafe Atlantico.  Oh my goodness!  One of the most ridiculously amazing meals I’ve had in a while.  The chef, Jose Andres, makes these crazy ‘molecular gastronomy’ dishes which combines chemistry and art with regular old cooking creating unbelievable flavor experiences for the mouth and eyes.  We got the tasting menu for around $35 and you get around 20 small dishes and is quite filling.  Even plain old guacamole is served with style being made from scratch by the waiter right beside your table.

Jose also does an even crazier 6 person dinner twice a night called Minibar.   This decadent meal will set you back $95.  I’ll have to save that one for a special occasion.

Later that night, Jose battled on Iron Chef (perfect timing).  The best part was he and his assistant Chef Katsuya (who cooked for use earlier that day) absolutely DEMOLISHED iron chef Flay.  It was quite possibly the best beat down I’ve ever seen on the show.  He showed some of his unique molecular gastronomy techniques with flavored foams, flavor syringes, and trapping smoke in large glass domes over the final dishes.  The man is a true flavor and food technician and I’m honored to have eaten his food.

Vanilla potato foam with American caviar

PS. Talking about music, here’s a link to my college a cappella group, Joyful Noise.  Recordings from when I was in there aren’t up yet, but they have some older albums on the site.

The Game of Work confused me a bit, though.  I guess the same concept applies, the better you manage work, the more satisfying and game like it becomes.  But while that is true, I think the actual work you do plays a significant role and it’s not as simple as that.  If your job consists of boring repetitive tasks, it will remain like that however well you manage your workflow.  However, indirectly, that better management could be what you need to move to a more satisfying position.

All in all, this tagline is a great ideal to work towards.  I truly believe those who master this combination are most likely to find happiness.

But today I was just thinking about this urgency I’ve had to get stuff done. I keep thinking that one of these days, I will be ‘DONE’. The point of GTD (Getting Things Done) is to clear your mind of the tasks that weight down your mind, but there’s still always that looming sense of some tasks that have been on your to do lists for way too long and you start to feel guilty.

So what the heck is this magical day I’m working towards? Well, my goal in this dash of productivity is to clear off the items that have been looming over me since I graduated last May. Since my working life started at a crazy internet startup, I’ve put aside almost all my side activities (ie had no life). The problem is that these looming tasks always make me feel like any time spent just for myself is procrastination and could be used productively. GTD is finally helping me to burn through these old tasks. My hope is that I get to a point where I cross off those last few looming things and I sit there and think, “Hmm, I can’t think of anything to do, I’m going to go do something completely fun and unproductive.”

Oh yea, it also is great for pushups and situps when you put it on the floor.

This solves the three problems above very well. 1) You can download any of those “keeper messages” to your hard drive 2) If you have an organized e-mail system, you can simply treat your voice messages as part of your inbox and track them like you do your e-mails 3) If you have multiple phones, you no longer need to keep checking multiple phones.

The service is ad supported. They do ask for some marketing info and they include an ad in the e-mail (pretty smart) they send as well as put ads on the site. They also have premium service levels if you want them to check your messages more times per day and get some other cool features.

I’m excited. One of the most useful sites I’ve found in a while.

GotVoice

If you had a child that went into a war due to some false premises or bad intelligence, then you are in a situation where you must make this distinction about what “supporting” them means.  Do you support them by a) doing whatever you can do to get them out of harms way sooner or b) blindly keep them there and tell anyone who is criticizing plans to get troops out that they are not ‘supporting’ your kids.
Unfortunately, option B is what you are doing if you use the phrase “Support the troops” to discourage criticism of the war. Let’s support the troops by helping them get out of harms way as soon as we can rather than trying to make ourselves look patriotic by shutting down discussions that can really help.

This is a case that I think it is good to have the government intervention. Free market competition is forcing restauranteurs to use the cheapest health harming substances to compete.
The consumer side of the market is unable to demand transfat free food through their eating choices and purchasing decisions because they are unable to discern who is using transfat substitutes. The government’s action here is good to provide protection of consumer health where the consumer market is not able to do so effectively.

It’s really sad what we mean by ‘safety’ in this context for those of us on American soil. ‘Safety’ is really just knowing that others (not you) will die to reduce the already very remote chance that you’ll ever get hit by an attack. And even that reduction in risk is questionable. By sending troops there, we’ve basically just relocated the target of attacks off our own soil.

How staunch supporters of the war can call the thousands of 9/11 deaths a tragedy and the thousands of troop deaths (plus tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths) a victory is beyond me. It’s amazing what we’ll convince ourselves of so that we can feel ‘safe’.

I’ve only noticed one issue with running wordpress on GoDaddy which is I can’t seem to be able to use pretty urls for my post addresses.  The other thing is support for Ruby isn’t included until the next higher purchase level (I got the economy hosting), which I was looking at learning eventually.  Besides that I’m quite pleased with the hosting so far and from past experience, their service has been quite good.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Edward Tufte is a data visualizations god. He takes real solid human factors and psychological research and turns data visualization into a hard science. His books are exceptional in content as well as actual print and materials quality. The images he packs in his books are nothing but aggregations of data and concepts, but the result is beautiful works of art. This is his first legendary book attacking the raw mechanics of graphing. I have his next two books, Envisioing Information and Visual Explanations, as well.

On a related note, check out Junk Charts, an information visualizations blog. They take dava visualizations and redo them much nicer and is a great way to see some data visualization transformations in action.

PS. It’s not like I’m going to be making big bucks with this blog anytime soon, but I just think it’d be freakin cool to get a check for just writing in my blog, even if it’s a few pennies.

Table of contents for My Epi-Lasik Journal

1. My Epi-LASIK Journal pt1
2. My Epi-LASIK Journal pt2: Getting ready
3. My Epi-LASIK Journal pt3: Why I chose Epi-LASIK over regular LASIK
4. My Epi-LASIK Journal pt4: The night before
5. My Epi-LASIK Journal pt5: The morning of
6. My Epi-LASIK Journal pt6: The Operation
7. My Epi-LASIK Journal pt7: The Aftermath
8. My Epi-LASIK Journal pt8: Two days after
9. My Epi-LASIK Journal pt9: Three days after, some unevenness
10. My Epi-LASIK Journal pt10: Not so uneven
11. My Epi-LASIK Journal pt11: No more bandages
12. My Epi-LASIK Journal pt12: More bandages
13. My Epi-LASIK Journal pt13: A couple weeks later, no onions
14. My Epi-LASIK Journal pt 14: Epi-LASIK Video

I watched this video before my Epi-LASIK procedure. It’s a closeup view of the actual procedure in all it’s glory. You can now see Exactly what I went through. I can’t speak for how you will respond to it, but I think watching it helped me get a little more comfortable with the procedure. Believe me, I was squirming massively while watching this video (don’t say I didn’t warn you). But by the second viewing I was a bit more comfortable (just a bit). But my philosophy is the more information you have the better. Hard to beat an actual video of the operation. Good luck getting through the video if you decide to hit play…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Note: In this Epi-LASIK video, you’ll see that the surgeon cuts an epithelial flap and then replaces it afterwards. According to my surgeon, this is being phased out in the Epi-LASIK procedure. The consensus among leading surgeons is that recovery is actually better if the flap is not put back. So the surgery is actually completed significantly faster than seen in this video. That’s good news for you!